Review: Voidling Bound | Steam

Skylanders in Space Finally Clicks

I have been following Voidling Bound for the best part of a year. I previewed it off the back of that DNA-splicing reveal, spent a good while arguing with my own TikTok comments about whether it was “Spore meets Pokemon” or, as one sharp viewer insisted, “Spore meets Warframe”, and I dug into all of that in my Is Voidling Bound Really Like Spore? feature. Through it all, my Xbox-owning audience kept asking the same thing: when do we actually get to play it? The PC version has been out since the ninth of June, I have sunk a fair chunk of time into it, and I am pleased to report the wait was worth it. This is Skylanders in space, minus the plastic, and I really enjoyed it.

What is Voidling Bound?

For anyone arriving fresh, a quick recap. Voidling Bound is the debut game from Hatchery Games, a Canadian studio founded by former Skylanders developers, and that pedigree is stamped all over it. You play a faceless Space Wrangler aboard a ship, using neural-transfer technology to bond with creatures called Voidlings and take direct control of them down on the surface of corrupted planets. Earth and its neighbours are being consumed by a spreading alien blight, and the Voidlings are humanity’s answer.

In practice it is two games woven together. On the ship you manage everything: upgrade stations, an incubator for hatching eggs, a breeding pen, and a sanctuary where your collected creatures wander about and, adorably, occasionally nod off. Down on the planets it becomes a fast, third-person action game, where you cleanse the purple corruption, blast alien robots and comb every corner for research points and elemental Mutagens. It is a creature-collector shooter RPG, which is a lot of hyphens, but it works.

The creatures carry it

The Voidlings are the reason to be here. The art style is bright, confident and full of character, and the eight species are a joy to collect, from the jellyfish-like Nimiod to the Gremlins-inspired Gwigoon and the bird-like Kwipeck you start with. Each one plays like a class rather than a reskin. The Kwipeck fires off rapid ranged shots like an assault rifle, the Glick (which I affectionately called my shotgun dog) gets right in your opponent’s face, and the melee-only Ur-Sek hits like a truck. Watching them shift shape and colour as they evolve down their branching paths never got old, and with 248 evolutions to chase, there is always another form to unlock.

Combat that lets you be the monster

Where most creature collectors sit you back for turn-based battles, Voidling Bound puts you inside the creature. The third-person combat is quick and responsive, built around a primary attack, a secondary, a buff or debuff and an ultimate you charge up, with cooldowns to juggle in the style of an action-RPG like Diablo. It runs beautifully, too, which matters. Landing on a planet is seamless, and the moment-to-moment fighting is consistently satisfying.

The real depth, though, lives in the three creature-crafting systems we flagged back in the preview: hatching, breeding and DNA splicing. Eggs hatch into randomised creatures, breeding lets you chase better stats, and splicing lets you graft mutations from any species onto your favourite. Once splicing opens up, the game blooms. You can build a Voidling to your exact taste, stacking abilities and buffs into combinations that border on unfair, and stumbling onto a truly broken build is one of the game’s great pleasures. It is comfortably the best creature-building I have played in years.

Where it comes up short

I loved my time with Voidling Bound, but a positive review should still be an honest one, and there are rough edges. The biggest is simply that I wanted more of it. There are four main areas, three planets and the Abyss, and I rolled the credits on the campaign in around eleven hours. The endgame, a risk-and-reward wave mode called Void Strikes, is fun but repetitive once the novelty fades.

The presentation shows its indie budget in a couple of places. There is no voice acting, so conversations with your crew land a little flat, and the story of battling a nameless purple corruption is thin and forgettable. Balance is uneven, too. Once I built a plasma Nimiod that flattened everything, my carefully collected team mostly gathered dust, and the training gym that levels a Voidling to the cap in minutes makes an already gentle challenge gentler still. The enemy designs, all blocky robots and crystals, never match the imagination of the Voidlings facing them.

None of these are dealbreakers. They are the kind of problems that come from a game with a brilliant core that simply needs filling out, and I would happily take a few content drops to get there.

The Xbox question

The one thing my regular readers will want to know: this is still a PC release, on Steam and the Epic Games Store, for now. Hatchery Games has confirmed console versions for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Switch 2 at a later date, but there is no firm date yet. I played on PC, and if you are on Xbox, this is one to wishlist and keep an eye on. It is well worth the wait.

The verdict

Voidling Bound is a whimsical, extraterrestrial zoo with a superb creature-crafting engine and genuinely moreish action at its heart, held back only by a shortage of content and a few missing production touches. As a first game from a young studio, it is a hugely promising foundation, and as a love letter to anyone who grew up on Skylanders, Pokemon or Monster Rancher, it hits the spot. I am rooting for Hatchery Games to build on this, and in the meantime I have had a lovely time petting aliens. You will too.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Pros: Gorgeous, characterful creatures; deep, rewarding evolve-breed-splice crafting; fast, satisfying combat that runs great; easy to pick up.

Cons: Campaign feels short; no voice acting and a forgettable story; balance and team systems undercooked; dull enemy designs.